Setting, Metaplot, and Context

[coxcomb]

I have noticed some disdain for setting-heavy games here at the forge, and have been wrestling with the topic for quite a while now myself. In this post, I would like to start some discussion about the value of setting and about how that value is best achieved.

A few years back I became aware of a thing that I have been calling context. This is anything (I do mean anything) that serves to assist the player in portraying his character. The way it happened was this: I sat down for a first session of plain vanilla D&D with some friends, and I started off with the old "how do we all know one another?" deal. Someone said, "Uh, I dunno, maybe we were all childhood friends." That's it. We all got a little more "into" the game because of this simple fact. Somebody would try something and fail, and someone else would say, "Yeah remember that time when we were kids and you tried that stunt? You broke your leg then too." or whatever (reality was more clever than that example).

Anyway, I started to think about cool it was to have some thread to pull on when you needed something to do or say in character. It occurred to me that this was why I liked Forgotten Realms. Not because the style of fantasy it represents was my style (far from it)--because the maps and descriptions of inns and taverns and secret organizations provided a wealth of context that everyone who read the material had in common.

So I decided that detailed setting was good. Time passed and I started playing with new folks--folks who paid very close attention to published settings. Then I had a series of games that made me think setting was bad.

First I was exposed to games wherin I had to make a bunch of character choices that placed me in a specific and social position within the game. The worst of these was Werewolf. I wanted to play a werecat instead of a weredog. I was told that that wouldn't work in this world because of x and y and z. In this case, the setting provided lots of context for the players, but it also made many choices mutually exclusive. The context felt more restrictive than liberating, like I wasn't allowed to make any important decisions about my character beyond choosing a faction. And it seems that lots of games in the post-White Wolf era have become similarly factionalized.

Next I was exposed to metaplot in the worst form. That is, the GM read all of the published source material, and took every bit of metaplot as set in stone. So I may have been able to make choices about who my character was supposed to be, but on many points I was unable to make choices that affected the events in the setting. If the book said x was going to happen, then x happened regardless of PC action.

All that being said, there is some context to be gained from establishing PC factions and from a certain amount of metaplot (though I'm personally not a fan).

My questions are these:
1.) Where is the line where setting material becomes more burdensome than helpful?
2.) Does anyone have thoughts about how the type and amount of setting material relates to GNS?
3.) Is metaplot ever constructive, or desired?
4.) Do you (as player and GM) prefer that context come from the players themselves, from the setting, or a mixture?

Discuss

[Rob Carriere]

1.) Where is the line where setting material becomes more burdensome than helpful?

I think the answer has much less relation to the amount and nature of the material than it has to players' attitude to the setting. I've been in games where a player challenged the GM on the width of the road (“According to the setting, this is a much more traveled road“) and I've been in games where entire cities were discarded in mutual consent because they were in the way. Both of these can work, provided that everybody has roughly the same attitude.

3.) Is metaplot ever constructive, or desired?

Personal preference: only if there is large difference of scale. In other words, the PCs should have no chance of affecting metaplot level events, those are simply part of the campaign background.

4.) Do you (as player and GM) prefer that context come from the players themselves, from the setting, or a mixture?

Mix. The setting helps everything get established and the player input usually anchors the PCs in the setting much better.

SR
—

[Eric Provost]

Hiya,

I've disucssed Metaplot with my players extensively.  I've come to the conclution that, for my purposes, Metaplot is constructive and desireable when it covers areas that the PCs could never, or would never affect.  History is the best example I think.  Unless the game has easy time travel, then the PCs can't affect what has already happened.  Tell me everything important that's happend in the past, then tell me everything that's important -right now-.  

Don't cover the future, unless it has nothing to do with anything the PCs could ever affect.  In fact, don't cover the future at all if you're going to cover it in 'This WILL happen' terms.  How about a list of "Possible Future Occurrances and their Ramifications"?  That could inspire me as a GM instead of painting me (and my players) into a corner.

Along with "Don't cover the future", please don't update the present.  It always gets under my skin.  For example, one of my favorite games is WW's Mage:The Ascention.  I dig it.  Been playing it from the day it hit the shelves.  Now, just a few years back, WW decides to do a little revamp on all their games.  I didn't mind shelling out a few more dollars for some patched rules, but with the updated rules, they updated the setting!  They said "Hey, um... the BadGuys won the war, and um... This is how everything changed from that win."  Ooohhh that got to me.  I mean, it's not really a big deal, right?  I've still got my setting from my older editions, and I can use the rules I like from the newer edition, right?  Sure, sure.  Now, imagine me trying to introduce the game to a new player.  I talk up the setting & what kind of game I'm ready to run, then I offer the new player a copy of the rule to borrow.  I'm in a pickle.  Do I offer the old rules with the metaplot I like, or do I offer the new rules with the metaplot I don't like.  In either event, I've got to tell the player to 'Just ignore that part, I'm using bits from another book'.  

Sure, it's do-able, just annoying.  I hate future metaplot *shakes fist*

Anywho, back to writing for this weekend's game.

-Eric

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there

Coxcomb, you wrote,

1.) Where is the line where setting material becomes more burdensome than helpful?
2.) Does anyone have thoughts about how the type and amount of setting material relates to GNS?
3.) Is metaplot ever constructive, or desired?
4.) Do you (as player and GM) prefer that context come from the players themselves, from the setting, or a mixture?

I think the issue of "burdensome" is very definitely a matter of what is not emphasized in conjunction with setting. I've tried to present the idea that setup for play includes an incredible amount of diversity in terms of how detailed or "set" each of the five components of Exploration is.

So "burdensome" for any of those components would be defined, for me, as inappropriately detailed relative to the work I've put in (and am committed more to) for any of the other components.

You might have a very detailed setting and leave plenty of room for characters to develop their own takes on it; you might do the opposite. That's just one tiny example ... um, to take it to the real world, since characters in Castle Falkenstein start very sketchy, I found myself and the other group members eager to soak up some setting before and especially during play. But since characters in Dust Devils start very richly, setting stuff that failed to impact character issues directly tended to be annoying to us, like mosquitoes.)

(This is an unsubtle example; games like Zero and Alyria present a whole weird spin on this same isssue and don't fit well into the spectrum represented by Castle Falkenstein and Dust Devils. And the overall depth of detail for different games varies too, which makes comparisons tricky; I am really talking about emotional commitment rather than "detail.")

You can find a hell of a lot about setting in all of my GNS-oriented essays, and I think the main thing I'd say as an introduction is to beware the easy first impression that Simulationist play is necessarily setting-heavy and that the other two are not. There are some historical publishing issues that do give that impression.

Regarding metaplot, I strongly suggest looking at some older threads in this forum. You'll see that definitions for the term differ very widely, ranging from issues of scale, issues of time, and issues of impact on the characters' lives, issues of out-of-character vs. in-character knowledge, and to issues of expectations about the characters' behavior.

That means that for me to answer your third question, either you'd have to accept my definition, or you'd have to provide one. You can find my definition in my essays, most recently in Narrativism: Story Now, and how metaplot (as I define it) relates to that mode of play.

Finally, about context (which I like very much, the way you've defined the term), I think that once people start reaching satisfaction with their role-playing, they become more open to trying different ways to achieve context. I'm pretty sure that groups which struggle over the "right" way to do it are really struggling about something more fundamental, whether Creative Agenda or some social stuff or whatever.

One last thing: if possible, please try to avoid phrases like "Here at the Forge people disdain [whatever]." You might have seen some posts that gave you that impression, but it's very likely that (a) the very same posters would tell you about conditions in which they would like [whatever], and (b) other posters may be extremely favorable to [whatever] and you simply haven't seen those posts. Phrases like that tend to polarize people and create differences in a thread which really wouldn't otherwise have been contentious. No big deal, but after a while here, I hope you'll see that you're not adding to the discussion with comments of that kind.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

I have noticed some disdain for setting-heavy games here at the forge, and have been wrestling with the topic for quite a while now myself.

I haven't noticed that. In fact, I've seen a lot of praise for games based on Glorantha, a setting so heavy that only Lord of the Rings can be compared to it favorably. However, there is a tendency to design games with a lot less setting, and for a number of reasons, which I may be able to address in relation to your questions.

Where is the line where setting material becomes more burdensome than helpful?

Ah, I am always asking this question. Let me tell you why.

I create worlds for Multiverser. When I'm doing them for my own use, I can leave a lot of stuff out, because I know that I'll be filling it in on the fly in keeping with the general idea I have in my head; but when I'm working on something for publication, I have to give a lot of thought to how much detail there should be.

The answer is always different, and always the same. The answer is this: there should be exactly as much detail as will be needed to run the game in that setting.

Let's take maps, for example. Do you need a map? In our First Book of Worlds there are two maps. Note that there are seven worlds, really nine distinct game settings. Only two maps were necessary. One of those maps was needed because we were doing a dungeon crawl, and although it was a recurring labyrinth, if you're going to follow a character around a labyrinth you need a map. The other was a game of cat-and-mouse in which the player character would be the mouse: he gets a head start, and the hunter chases him. That meant the positions of both individuals had to be traceable, so that required a map. For the other worlds, generally little more was needed than a general description of where things were relative to each other, sometimes in distance and direction, sometimes in time with a randomizer.

Our Second Book of Worlds contains no maps at all. There will be several maps in the next book, but that's because there are a couple of worlds in it that need them.

The answer is that a scenario/setting should have exactly as much detail as it needs to provide the referee with the tools he needs to run it.

No matter what you do, setting is an obstacle to play: someone has to learn it. I'll be running an Alyria demo at Ubercon III at the end of this month, and I'm trying desperately to organize a massive amount of setting information into capsules. I'll have four hours to introduce the core concepts and get a game going far enough that the players understand what's happening. I can't expect them to read the book (it is not yet even published). It has wonderfully rich concepts and images, but these are going to have to be distilled for rapid consumption. That means I have a lot of work to do, to understand all the setting elements; and my players have a barrier to admission, because they, too, must have some understanding of these elements.

Now, Multiverser has an interesting way of lowering the barrier: it assumes that player characters don't know anything about the setting until they explore it, and thus all that they learn is derived in-game. I've played games where that approach was terribly frustrating. Gamma World leaps to mind, because I always felt like we had lived so many years in this world and couldn't even identify an edible plant. In my D&D games, I escape some of the problems of players not knowing the world by introducing their characters as new arrivals on the frontier, where customs are different and they don't know their ways around. If you can find a good reason why players don't have to know the material, it works much smoother--but you still have to have the referee steeped in such knowledge, so he has to do the reading.

So you need to provide exactly that amount of material that facilitates play, no more, and no less.

2.) Does anyone have thoughts about how the type and amount of setting material relates to GNS?

Yes. It doesn't.

Creative Agenda might be facilitated by the way you organize the materials. Legends of Alyria, taking that again as an example, has a rather sizeable amount of setting material, but it doesn't have a map (there he goes with the map thing again--well, it was Alyria that made me realize this). In Alyria, you're given detailed chunks of setting that you can use to create story, but you get to put them wherever you want them to be. That's a lot more supportive of narrativist play than it would be of gamist or simulationist approaches. I can find games with high-volume high-density setting that tend to support any one of the creative agenda, and I can find very spare games that support each of them. There's no real connection.

d3.) Is metaplot ever constructive, or desired?

As Ron suggests, it depends on what you mean by "metaplot".

I've run a number of scenarios in which it is established that there is a timeline of events that are going to happen if nothing intervenes; frequently those events are of such magnitude that nothing really can intervene.

In Multiverser's version of Sherwood Forest, the current kings of all the adjacent European countries are given, along with some of the order of succession for those who will change within the span of years over which the game is anticipated to be played. There is little or nothing that the player character can do to alter the succession of the kings of Scotland, for example, even if he desired to do so. Similarly, he cannot prevent Prince John from becoming King John--unless he kills him.

I will sometimes plot events behind the scenes, and let the players flounder along looking for their answers. After all, the villains aren't going to be frozen in time and space waiting for the heroes to find them; they're going to be active. If I know what they're going to do, I can work out where they are at any given moment. Sometimes that's a very effective way to run a scenario; other times it isn't.

Metaplot only really works in two cases: when the player characters cannot conceivably alter it but will be impacted by it (such as the succession of galactic emperors when they're stuck on a backwater colony planet), and when it is handled fluidly enough that player character choices can impact it. I don't think the sort of overarching metaplot associated with White Wolf fits either of these categories, and if that's what you mean, it's at best a very bad application of a reasonable idea.

4.) Do you (as player and GM) prefer that context come from the players themselves, from the setting, or a mixture?

Not particularly. I do like creating some of the context for my character, but I also enjoy having some of it sprung on me. It depends to a great degree on what's happening in the game.

What you have to watch out for is what might be termed unfair surprise. It is unfair to suddenly produce something about a character that the player would not have guessed which severely hampers his effectiveness.

I'll have to invent an example. In Star Frontiers we're told in the book that Dralasites are color blind. In the Volturnus modules we are told that there are space pirates who all have a tattoo of a red devil on their arms. When we played this adventure, we got some color supplies and got past their security systems by painting imitation tattoos on our arms. Now, let's suppose that the players have not been informed that the dralasite characters are colorblind, and they all played dralasites, and at this moment they decide to draw those tattoos on their arms to get past the electronic security--and suddenly the referee says, I'm sorry, you can't do that, because you're all color blind, so you don't know what the colors are in the tattoo. That would be unfair surprise.

That's an extreme example; but in many other ways referees and scenarios pull the rug out from under player characters without warning. In fact, here's an actual play example from Star Frontiers. The basic survival kit that each character grabbed while rushing out of the burning lifecraft contained a small first aid kit including a shot of something called Stimdose, which we all knew would restore a few points of damage if administered. Each of us carried this. Then, in a very strange fight situation, we split up, two PCs and an NPC in one group, two PCs and an NPC in the other; there was a medic in each group. Then abruptly in the one group the two PCs got delayed and the NPC, who was that group's medic, rushed out ahead, only to be hit by a very potent weapon at very short range. The PCs rushed over to him; under the rules he had one minute during which we could save his life if we could administer stimdose. However, it was at that moment that we learned that we could not use the first aid kits we had been carrying because we were not medics. We had no chance of saving him, and we had no idea that that was the case before it happened. The other medic was too far away to reach us, and we lost our NPC medic.

Unfair surprise. Our characters certainly would have known that they could not use those injections; we should have been made aware of it.

So it doesn't really matter where the context originates, as long as it doesn't spring up and bite the players on the nose at a critical moment.

I hope some of that is helpful.

--M. J. Young

[coxcomb]

Hm, good points all.

Ron is right, I should not have said, "I have noticed some disdain for setting-heavy games here at the forge". Not least of which because what I meant was "I have noticed a wide range of opinions about published settings...".

!!!

I think a light bulb just went on for me.

Context (the way that I have defined it) has to do with character. It is something that helps you play the character you have chosen. But what I didn't realize until now is that context comes in a variety of flavors, each of which acts a bridge for the player between character and one of the other elements of exploration.

To expand on that:

System Context: Relates the character to the system for the player. Stats act as system context in every game I have ever played. If Joe is playing D&D, chooses a fighter, and rolls his attributes, he has system context. That is, he has a good idea what kinds of actions at which he is likely to succeed and what kinds of actions are best not attempted. You need system context to relate to the sotry being told because your character can do all sorts of things that you, the player, cannot.

Setting Context: Connects the character to the fictional place where he exists. Where System Context relates to the probability of success for game actions, Setting Context has to do with the way those actions affect the setting. If Joe decides that his D&D fighter is a member of a mercinary company established in the campaign setting, he has some setting context.

Situation Context: Informs the player as to the character's personality. That is, outside of the context of setting and ability, how the character would logically respond to a given situation or plot point. If Mary is playing Champions and chooses the Psychological Disadvantage: Claustrophobia, she has some situation context.

Color Context: Provides detail that makes the character nore "real" to the player. If Mary's Champions character has an energy blast that she has described as "shimmering blue lightning", she has some color context. When she uses that power in the game she (and everyone else) has some extra detail to aid visualization.


Does this make sense to anyone else?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jay,

Yes it does! That would be, in detail, what the five components of Exploration are. Why do I say "are"? Because they only operate in the context of shared, communicated imagining ... and without those exact qualities you outline, they would have no "weight" in that medium.

Best,
Ron

[Doctor Xero]

coxcomb wrote Thu Feb 05, 2004 7:43 pm:
> Context (the way that I have defined it) has to do with character. It is something that
> helps you play the character you have chosen. But what I didn't realize until now is
> that context comes in a variety of flavors, each of which acts a bridge for the player
> between character and one of the other elements of exploration.
>
> To expand on that:

System Context: Relates the character to the system for the player. Stats act as system context in every game I have ever played. If Joe is playing D&D, chooses a fighter, and rolls his attributes, he has system context. That is, he has a good idea what kinds of actions at which he is likely to succeed and what kinds of actions are best not attempted. You need system context to relate to the story being told because your character can do all sorts of things that you, the player, cannot.

Setting Context: Connects the character to the fictional place where he exists. Where System Context relates to the probability of success for game actions, Setting Context has to do with the way those actions affect the setting. If Joe decides that his D&D fighter is a member of a mercenary company established in the campaign setting, he has some setting context.

Situation Context: Informs the player as to the character's personality. That is, outside of the context of setting and ability, how the character would logically respond to a given situation or plot point. If Mary is playing Champions and chooses the Psychological Disadvantage: Claustrophobia, she has some situation context.

Color Context: Provides detail that makes the character more "real" to the player. If Mary's Champions character has an energy blast that she has described as "shimmering blue lightning", she has some color context. When she uses that power in the game she (and everyone else) has some extra detail to aid visualization.

I absolutely love this schema!  Not only is it intellectually satisfying (as well as intuitively
accurate), it is applicable to game design theory.

A game system with a strong setting (as opposed to a universalist system) would most
likely need to address the means through which the interaction of the game master, players,
and gaming system negotiate  System, Setting, Situation, and Color contexts.

I think that the Situation Context also neatly addresses Ross' motivation schema
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9631

At the same time, I suspect that Narrativists, Gamists, and Simulationists would rank
the importance of each of the four contexts differently.

Doctor Xero

[Doctor Xero]

Ron Edwards wrote Thu Feb 05, 2004 7:46 pm:
> That would be, in detail, what the five components of Exploration are.

Five components?

Doctor Xero

[RDU Neil]

Hm, good points all.

Ron is right, I should not have said, "I have noticed some disdain for setting-heavy games here at the forge". Not least of which because what I meant was "I have noticed a wide range of opinions about published settings...".

!!!

I think a light bulb just went on for me.

Context (the way that I have defined it) has to do with character. It is something that helps you play the character you have chosen. But what I didn't realize until now is that context comes in a variety of flavors, each of which acts a bridge for the player between character and one of the other elements of exploration.

To expand on that:

System Context: Relates the character to the system for the player. Stats act as system context in every game I have ever played. If Joe is playing D&D, chooses a fighter, and rolls his attributes, he has system context. That is, he has a good idea what kinds of actions at which he is likely to succeed and what kinds of actions are best not attempted. You need system context to relate to the sotry being told because your character can do all sorts of things that you, the player, cannot.

Setting Context: Connects the character to the fictional place where he exists. Where System Context relates to the probability of success for game actions, Setting Context has to do with the way those actions affect the setting. If Joe decides that his D&D fighter is a member of a mercinary company established in the campaign setting, he has some setting context.

Situation Context: Informs the player as to the character's personality. That is, outside of the context of setting and ability, how the character would logically respond to a given situation or plot point. If Mary is playing Champions and chooses the Psychological Disadvantage: Claustrophobia, she has some situation context.

Color Context: Provides detail that makes the character nore "real" to the player. If Mary's Champions character has an energy blast that she has described as "shimmering blue lightning", she has some color context. When she uses that power in the game she (and everyone else) has some extra detail to aid visualization.


Does this make sense to anyone else?

Very nice.  Solid but flexible and as Doctor Xero said, allows for different play styles to prioritize them in different order.

Thumbs up.

[Gordon C. Landis]

Five components?

Character, System, Setting, Situation, and Color - the five Explored elements in Ron's various essays.  From the Nar essay:

"The five elements of Exploration are interdependent: Character + Setting make Situation, System permits Situation to "move," and Color affects all the others. This concept applies only to the imaginary causes among the elements; the real people's actual priority or cause among these things, in social and creative terms, varies widely. See my essay "GNS and other matters of role-playing theory" (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/) for more about these elements."

The five Explored elements (CSSSC?) get overshadowed by the three Creative Agendas (GNS) in most discussions, but  . . .  they shouldn't.  Gettin' clear on the five elements can be a real boost to yer gameplay regardless of Creative Agenda, IMO.

Gordon

[coxcomb]

So really, when I have been telling myself these past few years that a system needs to provide or encourage context, what I was talking about was giving players connections to the five explorative elements.

It seems like every player has a preference in each of the type of context. I, for example, am very unhappy when I build a character who is supposed to be good at certain things according to the published system, but in practice is only medicre at them. So I look to system context for predictability.